Wed Dec 13 2017As the FCC prepares to vote on new Open Internet rules that will open the door for increased investment and digital innovation, there is a lot of misinformation that this is the "end of the world as we know it" for the Internet. It’s important to take a moment, step back, and make clear what is happening here – and what is not happening – and to alleviate any concerns and address how consumers and the Internet will remain fully protected.

This is not the end of net neutrality. Despite repeated distortions and biased information, as well as misguided, inaccurate attacks from detractors, our Internet service is not going to change. Comcast customers will continue to enjoy all of the benefits of an open Internet today, tomorrow, and in the future. Period.

Consumers will remain fully protected. We have repeatedlystated, and reiterate today, that we do not and will not block, throttle, or discriminate against lawful content. These fundamental tenets of net neutrality are also key components of our core network and business practices – they govern how we run our Internet business.

Will Comcast broadband customers still be able to visit any lawful site they want to? Yes.

Will Comcast block or throttle access to Internet sites? No.

Is Comcast creating Internet fast lanes? No, we’ve said consistently we’ve not entered into paid prioritization agreements and have no plans to do so.

Will Comcast still clearly post policies on network management? Absolutely, you can find them here.

Light touch regulation allows for more competition in the marketplace and increased investment and innovation. There’s no question that an open Internet is important. There is also no doubt that investment is essential to fostering technological growth. Since its creation, the Internet has opened the door for tremendous digital advances and innovations. It has changed how we communicate and how we interact on a day to day basis. The politically guided and motivated decision by the Wheeler FCC in 2015 to revert to Title II regulation slowed the pace of advancement and limited choices in the marketplace. For example, it was that misguided thinking that stunted the rollout of Comcast’s Stream TV, an in-home, IP-based cable service, which was stalled from a broad consumer rollout because of an unnecessary protracted FCC investigation.

The FCC’s order means what its title promises: restoring Internet freedom. Consumers deserve choice and a thriving, innovative competitive marketplace under light touch regulation. The contemplated ruling removes the overhang created by Title II and rightfully reclassifies broadband Internet access as an interstate information service. Additionally, the order returns authority to the FTC to regulate data privacy and security for the entire Internet ecosystem under a uniform federal technology-neutral framework. It also requires all Internet providers to disclose their net neutrality practices, and will hold ISPs accountable to these practices. The inter-agency agreement announced yesterday between the FCC and the FTC should put to rest the fear that there is any confusion about the relative enforcement jurisdictions of the two agencies in the net neutrality context.

Protecting the Internet is critical for the future. We should all agree that the Internet deserves a bright future, regardless of the political party in power. This is not a time for political grandstanding or heated, false rhetoric. Inaccurate cries of Armageddon have done nothing but stoke a partisan political fire that distracts from actually allowing policymakers to come together to develop sensible, transparent, and durable Open Internet regulations that protect the consumer, encourage investment, and strengthen the American economy. With the expected FCC action tomorrow, it’s time to set aside partisan threats of litigation or legislation. The best interests of consumers, Internet companies, and ISPs are now best served by bipartisan discussions and problem solving. You’ll hear more from me on this subject tomorrow.

]]>Wed Sep 06 2017Comcast NBCUniversal, including Telemundo, wants to add our voices to the growing coalition of businesses, faith groups, and community organizations urging Congress to pass legislation to protect Dreamers in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. We are disappointed to learn of the termination of this program and the potential consequences for young people and the families who came out of the shadows and enrolled with the government in good faith for the opportunity to contribute their talents to the American economy. But we want to welcome the opportunity to embrace a permanent and lasting solution to the needs of this important immigrant population.

Swift action to protect Dreamers is consistent with our values as Americans and in the best interests of our country. We are hopeful that Congress will act in a bipartisan manner swiftly to resolve this issue for all families affected by Tuesday’s announcement.

]]>Fri Mar 31 2017A little over a decade ago, I joined Comcast to help build a new business that was going to take on one of the most concentrated markets in communications – data services to businesses – and I’ve been working ever since to bring new and innovative products and services to business customers. Business data markets are engines of economic growth and job creation and competition in them is just as critical as in residential markets.

Today, more than ever before, the incumbent telcos like AT&T and Verizon are facing robust competition from cable companies like ours, as well as from CLECs, fiber providers and others. The marketplace for dedicated business data services has become increasingly competitive in the past few years. We are now doing everything from creating intranets for multi-location businesses like healthcare facilities and school districts, to providing "backhaul" links for wireless carriers, to enabling banks to set up private connections for ATMs and creating incredible experiences for fans at stadiums like those in Atlanta and Sacramento. Comcast alone has invested over $5 billion this decade to be a new competitor in these markets.

It doesn’t just take investment, hard work and good business sense to succeed in this market. It is also essential to have policies that support investment and innovation to keep the benefits of competition flowing to consumers. The proposals in the latest FCC order, which minimize burdensome and outdated regulations, are needed to make sure private industry keeps investing in the necessary infrastructure for this marketplace.

Light-touch regulation will continue to promote the surge in entry and investment by new competitors and encourage innovation, such as the deployment of Ethernet services that are driving price reductions and increasing service quality. And consumers benefit with faster wireless Internet access at their favorite café or while they watch their favorite team; schools and universities have better connectivity; and doctors to have instant access to patient medical records.

The FCC’s goal should be to encourage network investment, innovation and competition. The proposed order will do just that. It will help ensure that all providers can obtain a return on investment to fund further network enhancements and expansions. Competition will continue to flourish, and American businesses and their customers will continue to reap the benefits.

The proposed order will encourage greater network investment in less-populated areas and help bridge the digital divide in this country as well. Just as consumers in small towns often lack access to cutting-edge broadband technologies, the same is true for businesses in these communities—and for schools, libraries, and other anchor institutions. Comcast and others are making strides in offering faster and more competitive business broadband services throughout the country. And with better broadband connectivity, businesses and anchor institutions in these areas will be able to seize new economic opportunities and create more jobs.

We appreciate the FCC’s commitment to affirming and expanding pro-investment policies that have allowed us to bring more competition to cities and towns across the country. With this regulatory framework, Comcast will continue to invest in new facilities and services and will continue to serve as a key driver of competition in the years ahead, providing the innovative solutions that will drive American business growth and success from Main Street shops to Downtown office towers.

]]>Thu Apr 28 2016When the FCC adopted the Open Internet Order last year, Chairman Wheeler made one thing crystal clear: "To preserve incentives for broadband operators to invest in their networks," and "to provide returns necessary to construct competitive networks," there would be "no rate regulation, no tariffs, no last-mile unbundling" for broadband services and facilities.

To Members of Congress, when they asked whether the imposition of Title II common carrier regulation on broadband would lead to central-planner-style pricing controls.

To investors, who were nervous about the effect that rate regulation could have on economic incentives to deploy faster broadband networks across the country?

By FCC lawyers who repeated this promise to the D.C. Circuit, when arguing that there was no harm to broadband providers necessitating a stay of the FCC’s Title II ruling.

The ISP industry welcomed those promises and of course assumed that they would be honored—not only for residential broadband services, but for business broadband services as well, where competition often is even more robust, where the need for regulation is essentially nonexistent given the competition that is present, and where the need for continuing investments is at least as compelling.

Unfortunately, it appears that these repeated commitments were actually quite hollow. Today, the FCC adopted a notice of proposed rulemaking calling for business broadband services to be subjected to—you guessed it—rate regulation. Despite prior statements recognizing the investment-destroying effects of rate regulation, a majority of the Commission has now embraced and even expanded on the regulatory approach the Chairman rejected only a few months ago.

Remarkably, making matters worse, the FCC’s proposal to impose rate caps and other regulatory mandates extends beyond the incumbent telco providers to new entrants in that marketplace, such as Comcast and other cable companies that are investing billions of dollars of capital and bringing real competition and innovation to the sector. In this upside-down new regime, a competitive cable provider that currently holds a 10% share in a market would be treated the same as a dominant incumbent provider serving 90% of that market. Indeed, in a market where an incumbent is currently the only business services provider, any potential new entrant would be assured of facing rate regulation immediately upon entry, before even winning its first customer.

Never before has the FCC sought to saddle new entrants with such heavy-handed pricing mandates—in any arena, let alone the broadband marketplace Chairman Wheeler promised to shield from such regulation. The inevitable result of such regulation would be a huge disincentive for nascent competitors to continue investing and competing in the business services marketplace. That disincentive would result in significantly less entry and competition over time, meaning that market forces would not drive down prices or boost service quality; the FCC would have to try to engineer those results through top-down mandates alone—an approach that almost never delivers the intended benefits.

This new regulatory regime turns on its head traditional justifications for regulation. Normally, the government regulates only where there is a market failure that requires regulation to create the synthetic benefits of competition; as Chairman Wheeler put it in a speech earlier this year, "competitive markets produce better outcomes than highly regulated markets." Yet here, regulation is being injected into a competitive sector, thereby discouraging future investment and innovation and depriving customers of the existing competitive benefits, which the government then seeks to restore with regulation.

The proposed rules come as part of the FCC’s proceeding on "special access" services—a term customarily applied to dedicated, point-to-point connections to business premises and other locations (such as wireless cell sites), traditionally provided using legacy technology and long dominated by incumbent telephone companies. For decades, the FCC’s special access regime has distinguished between "dominant" incumbent providers and "non-dominant" competitors (like Comcast), and has imposed rate regulation only on the dominant providers that have the ability to control prices. That approach is the product of many years of bipartisan policy consensus and foundational antitrust law. It’s also common sense. Non-dominant providers, by definition, don’t have the power to charge above-market rates. And as a practical matter, potential new entrants are far more likely to deploy and invest in competitive networks and services when they know they won’t be subject to prescriptive rate regulation.

This rulemaking, like a bolt out of the blue, would lay waste to that longstanding and eminently sensible regulatory framework and would brush aside basic tenets of antitrust law. In its place, the FCC would establish a regime for so-called "business data services" (BDS), which would include not only the incumbent carriers’ traditional special access services, but also packet-based services offered by competitive providers like Comcast. The FCC proposes to eliminate any distinction between dominant and non-dominant providers of these services, and to impose rate regulation and other mandates on all providers in any markets found to be "insufficiently competitive." As far as we can tell, the FCC will seek to apply that label extremely broadly to entire classes of service offerings.

The upshot: non-dominant broadband service providers would be subjected to rate regulation (among other obligations) for the very first time. Again, a competitive cable provider with a 10% market share would be treated no differently from a dominant incumbent provider with a 90% share. That’s just nuts. And the asserted objective behind this upending of bedrock economic principles? The FCC’s theory is that doing so would somehow lead to more choice and greater competition in the business services marketplace.

That’s obviously wrong and embarrassingly bad policymaking. If the goal is to promote new entry and investment in business broadband services, the last thing the FCC should do is institute price controls and apply them to new entrants. The Chairman himself recognized this obvious principle when he tied his prior "no rate regulation" pledge to the need to "preserve incentives" to invest and "to provide returns necessary to construct competitive networks." Yet here a divided FCC is, proposing a regulatory regime that penalizes non-dominant, competitive providers for entering with prescriptive rate regulation. New entrants in the business services marketplace already face significant challenges competing against the incumbents. Such competitors will have to think long and hard before choosing to challenge an incumbent when they will also be confronted with government-mandated price controls. The stakes are too high to gamble on such a radical approach.

It should be obvious by now that these new fiber connections won’t build themselves. Comcast has invested over $5 billion since 2010 to enter the business services market as a new competitor offering highly innovative products that appeal to business customers of all sizes. But if the FCC imposes a heavy-handed new regulatory regime that threatens to deprive service providers of a reasonable return on investment, then further investments in competitive services simply won’t happen. Businesses of all sizes—but especially small to medium-sized businesses who buy the services most affected by the FCC’s proposal—will end up with less choice and will benefit less from innovation, and may end up paying even more for service in the long term.

These harms will have a direct impact on consumers. New entrants offer additional choice, improved technologies, and lower prices. Perhaps most importantly, in the wireless arena, where explosive data growth and the advent of 5G will require a huge investment in fiber connections to carry the data from new cell sites to the Internet, the chilling effect of this regulatory proposal will be felt the most.

The bottom line: we are concerned that Chairman Wheeler’s favorite refrain—"competition, competition, competition"—seems to be moving on to "regulation, regulation, regulation." We hope our concerns are misplaced.

]]>Thu Feb 18 2016Today, an FCC divided along partisan lines adopted an unbalanced notice seemingly predestined to lead to a new, anti-consumer government technology mandate on video set-top boxes.

The FCC’s action is disappointing - but not because the Commission voted to consider how to increase consumer choice in retail devices. That's a worthy goal that we support as well. The Commission’s divided action is flawed because it ignores the FCC’s own technical advisory committee report and instead puts the Commission’s thumb on the scale by endorsing a government-mandated technology solution. The right way to proceed would have been to issue a balanced rulemaking Notice and develop an appropriate record to make a rational judgment.

This vote squarely conflicts with the bi-partisan directive Congress sent to the FCC to establish a technical advisory committee to study device security issues to further the retail availability of devices. During over half a year of hard work, the technical experts considered two alternative visions, and did not reach a consensus. Today’s action inexplicably ignores the market-driven "apps" based approach suggested by the technical committee, which is rapidly proliferating in the market and giving consumers unprecedented options to receive video programming services.

Not surprisingly, objections to the proposal have been growing – and the objections come from a variety of independent and bipartisan sources. Members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike; numerous small and independent programmers; and diversity organizations, among others, have weighed in with significant concerns. For example, in a letter to the FCC last week, Senator Bill Nelson, the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee, laid out the advances in the video market, and advised that "the FCC must take a measured approach" in this rulemaking, including protecting programmers from interference by third parties.

Unfortunately, the majority of Commissioners have chosen to ignore the many voices of reason and instead to pursue a proposal that strays well beyond the FCC’s authority under the Communications Act, and would violate copyright and other statutory and constitutional protections.

And it’s just not enough to respond that the plethora of substantive objections that have been raised to this proposal will somehow be "taken care of," including through voluntary undertakings and certifications.

The playing field of the FCC in imposing technological mandates is littered with failure. The FCC imposed a CableCard technology mandate on cable operators years ago purportedly to drive greater retail availability of set-top boxes, but after more than $1 billion of costs to consumers, that approach has proven to be ineffective. Just five years ago, the FCC considered, and wisely abandoned, a similar proposal, known as "AllVid." Since that time, we’ve seen an explosion in innovation and competition in the video marketplace.

A new government technology mandate makes little sense when the apps-based marketplace solution also endorsed by the FCC’s technical advisory committee is driving additional retail availability of third-party devices without any of the privacy, diversity, intellectual property, legal authority, or other substantial concerns raised by the Chairman’s mandate.

We look forward to providing constructive input in this proceeding, and we hope the FCC will ultimately decide against this major step backwards for consumers and the video marketplace.

]]>Thu Jan 28 2016On Wednesday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler proposed a new technology mandate that would require satellite and cable TV providers to disaggregate or separate their services so that a few companies could repackage them as their own without negotiating for content rights like everybody else in the market does today. While the Chairman touts consumer benefits to his proposal, the opposite is the case.

The proposal, like prior federal government technology mandates, would impose costs on consumers, adversely impact the creation of high-quality content, and chill innovation. It also flies in the face of the rapid changes that are occurring in the marketplace and benefitting consumers.

As a member of the technical advisory committee that the FCC formed, I, along with others on the committee, put in an extraordinary amount of time examining these issues. The Report we produced comprehensively discussed the widely-adopted apps-based model. The Chairman ignores the less regulatory apps-based approach that is already expanding the array of choices that consumers have to access content on retail devices.

In the twenty-first century, television has been on a tear of innovation. In the 1980s, wanting your MTV became an anthem. The 1990s saw an explosion of channels and diversity of voices on television, and the beginnings of HDTV. Change has been accelerating ever since.

These changes are bringing enormous consumer benefits -- the quantity and variety of high-quality programming is better than ever, and consumers expect access to content anytime, anywhere, and on devices of their choice.

Comcast is responding with our innovative X1 platform, and enabling access on a growing array of devices. Like other traditional TV distributors, online video distributors, networks, and sports leagues, Comcast is using apps to deliver its Xfinity service to popular customer-owned retail devices.

These apps are wildly popular with consumers. Comcast customers alone have downloaded our apps more than 20 million times. This apps revolution is rapidly proliferating, and we are working with others in the industry and standards-setting bodies to expand apps to reach even more devices.

Given these exciting, pro-consumer marketplace developments, it is perplexing that the FCC is now considering a proposal that would impose new government technology mandates on satellite and cable TV providers with the purported goal of promoting device options for consumers.

A little background here. Congress enacted "navigation device" legislation twenty years ago that directed the FCC to foster retail alternatives to cable set-top boxes. The FCC responded with a CableCARD mandate. Despite the cable industry’s longstanding and ongoing support for CableCARDs, consumers showed little interest in the technology; it saddled cable operators and their customers with over $1 billion in unnecessary costs; and, it was overtaken by the explosive growth in connected devices and apps.

It is strange now that the FCC is ignoring the important lesson of history that intrusive federal governmental regulatory interference in the market just doesn't work by proposing new mandates at a time when Congress’s goals are being realized in the marketplace and consumers have unprecedented device choices that go well beyond what anyone could possibly have imagined even a decade ago.

The proposal would require traditional TV distributors like satellite and cable providers – but not other video distributors – to re-architect their networks and develop an undefined new piece of customer equipment just so device companies can take apart the video service and selectively reassemble it.

Consumer costs would rise, content security would weaken, and consumer protections such as privacy would erode. It would undermine intellectual property rights and content licensing agreements. The Chairman has said that his proposal addresses these concerns, but the simple fact is that the proposal strips away the tools that video distributors use to present service in a way that satisfies security, regulatory, and licensing requirements.

As noted, the FCC’s track record on these types of technology mandates has been less than stellar. CableCARD is just one example. Another is the 1394 output mandate. The FCC required cable operators to include 1394 outputs on their set-top boxes, the mandate went on for years even after it was clear that other outputs had won out in the marketplace.

As the Commission considers taking this initial step to launch a rulemaking proceeding to determine whether to impose new mandates and if so, what those should ultimately be, we look forward to studying the proposal and providing constructive input. We hope the FCC will decide to avoid this major step backward for consumers and video innovation.

Comcast has built the largest Wi-Fi network in America with over 3 million WiFi hotspots. We plan to have 8 million by the end of this year. And we are very interested in going even further to deliver Gigabit Wi-Fi to the nation. To do so, we’ll need the additional spectrum allocation this legislation is calling for.

Republicans and Democrats, Senators and Representatives all agree: America needs more Wi-Fi spectrum. Beginning two years ago with the bi-partisan, bi-cameral success of the unlicensed spectrum provisions of the Middle Class Tax Relief and Job Creation Act of 2012, Congress recognized the transformative power of unlicensed spectrum. Forward-looking Members from both sides of the aisle and both Houses of Congress have come together once again to provide a strong and clear path to unleash more unlicensed spectrum for innovative and efficient mobile broadband solutions.

Comcast has a strong commitment to our customers to provide the best Wi-Fi experience possible; we therefore applaud Reps. Latta, Eshoo, Issa, and Matsui for their leadership in this important area and we strongly support this pro-consumer legislation.